Digging Up Trouble

Not to mention she answered the phone.

“Taken by Surprise, this is Nina Quinn.”

“You’re too busy to be answering the phone.”

Tam. I smiled.

“You really need to find a fill-in for me.”

“I know.”

“Let me call a few people. I’ll have them there Monday at ten a.m.”

“Okay.”

“Wait. Check the schedule. Make sure you don’t have anything going on.”

I checked the schedule, feeling a little bit like a kid being told what to do.

“Nothing,” I said.

“I’ll take care of it.”

“You really should be resting.”

“All I do is rest.”

She had a point.

“How’d the visit to the dead guy’s wife go?”

I hedged.

“I told you so,” she said.

I heard corroborating clucking in the background and groaned. “I gotta go,” I said.

“Liar.”

“ ’Bye!”

I hung up, switched on the voice-mail system, and tried to get some work done.

Ten

“Do you want to have kids?”

I choked on my coconut ice cream, spitting some out, which was a shame because it was really good.

Bobby patted my back, a smile pulling at the corners of his lips.

“Sorry,” he said. “Just trying to get your attention.”

We were at StarBright, an old-fashioned drive-in movie theater. A speaker box was hooked over Bobby’s half- lowered window as Star Wars—the original—played on the big screen.

“Well, you’ve got it now.” I wiped a speck of coconut from the dashboard.

I’d been a crappy date. So lost in thoughts over lawsuits and blackmailers I hadn’t paid Bobby any attention at all. I was wasting prime drive-in make-out time.

“You thinking about that dead guy?”

Sadly, I stared at what was left of my little cup of ice cream. I’d lost my appetite. “Yeah.”

“Everything will work out.”

“Wish I could believe that.”

I must have sounded pathetic because he rubbed a knuckle over my cheek, leaned in and kissed me. I tried to move 84

Heather Webber

closer to him, but he drove a Celica that had bucket seats and one of the boxes in the middle that was a car’s equivalent of a kitchen junk drawer. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned bench seats? Did some sort of abstinence group have them outlawed?

A car honked next to us, followed by a series of “Woo-hoo, Mr. MacKenna.”

I’m sure I was blushing, but glad it was dark so the teens in the car next to us couldn’t see.

Bobby wiped his lips, gave a little wave to the group.

“Students,” he said.

“I figured.”

“Maybe we should go somewhere private?” he asked, a husky tone to his voice.

Panic swelled. This. Was. It.

Could I really do it?

It wasn’t as though I didn’t like Bobby. I really did. And it wasn’t as though my body wasn’t begging for me to say okay. It was.